Not PC

Friday, January 22, 2010

Who Needs Great Art?

Painting, movies, literature, sculpture, music, architecture ... all have the ability to make us cry, to make us laugh, and -- just occasionally -- to make us feel ten feet tall. Why is great art so powerful? -- why does it have this profound ability to affect us? Simply, because it speaks personally to each of us. It is our shortcut to our very souls. When we experience art that truly touches us, we don’t just feel, “I like this;” if we have souls we feel “This is Me!” Great art has enormous scope: it subsumes an enormous range of experience and thought and emotion, and integrates these three into a mental unit that our particularly human consciousness is able to grasp. It might be a painting, a sculpture, or a play or a building, but if it is well done we can all look at it or walk through it and almost immediately know -- without even being able to put it completely into words -- how the artists see the world around them. By experiencing the art they’ve produced, we should have a pretty fair idea of what they see as important in the world, and whether or not we too see the world in the same way. Think, for instance, of the lightning-like evaluation you make when you see this painting. Or this one. Or this collection of buildings. Or these. See what I mean? The integration involved in a good work of art subsumes all the experience, thought and emotion that goes into our own view of the world and, if we identify with it, allows us to point and say: “That’s Me!” or “That’s Not Me!” (So on that score, ask yourself about your reactions to those linked pieces, and what it tells you about the way you see the world.)

The point here is that art isn’t just a way to kick back after a difficult week -- which is one reason elevator music and abstract painting are so execrable. Art is a shortcut to our very philosophy; a way to see and to experience our deepest values, and also to celebrate them. Art -- good art -- shows us our way of seeing the world, while celebrating that that is the way we do see the world; more particularly, it celebrates our own individual way of seeing the world, and affirms it. Why do we need art to see the world when we’ve already got eyes and ears and fingers and hands with which to experience it ourselves, and a brain with which to organise those experiences? Answer: We need art precisely because of the nature of that brain, and because of the way it organises the experiences. Look at the way our knowledge of the world is acquired and held: our knowledge of the world around us begins with our senses, which provide us with material that is then organised by our brain into concepts; those concepts in turn are then integrated into propositions and theories. We start with sensations, derived from particular experiences, and these form the basis for all our higher abstractions: all our ideas, from ideas of love, of justice, of rights, of value ... all high-order abstractions; all derived from earlier concretes which are subsumed into concepts, and then subsumed into even wider concepts, and so on. This process of abstraction leading to further abstraction creates both the enormous power of the human mind, and its great weakness: its power to think in vast abstractions, and its inability to see these abstractions as one unit. That’s what art does for us: it gives us each the power to see all of our important abstractions as a single unit. To ‘fix’ each particular abstraction, as Ayn Rand points out in her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, we integrate the concept into a single mental unit: a word. Each word acts as a unit that integrates the constituent units of that particular concept, which brings together and holds for us in our minds the vast material referred to by the particular concept which that word is used to delineate. But as we integrate these high-end abstractions into even wider abstractions, we run into a problem: the scope becomes too vast and too amorphous to grasp as a whole. For that, we need art. Think for example of the Statues of Justice and of Liberty, and of Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People.” These don’t just sum up the concepts of liberty and justice; they offer an evaluation of them to boot. The relative position of our higher abstractions works of art is analogous to the position of a poem to a word; or that of a book to its chapter; or that of a piece of furniture to a building: the greater work orders, makes understandable and gives context to all the units subsumed, and brings into existence a new mental unit integrating them all. In making a work of art, we are offering a new mental unit that is at once a higher abstraction than those it subsumes, and a more concrete one. In making our abstractions concrete, it takes us back to the concretes from whence they came, but in a much more powerful form. Art allows us to see the totality of our worldview. If we follow Leonard Peikoff’s idea that philosophy is like a skyscraper, we can see that it is a rather oddly-shaped one. Peikoff's skyscraper begins at the lower levels with metaphysics, the nature of existence. It continues upwards with a few floors dedicated to epistemology, how we know what we know. On top of these lower floors and dependent on them are floors describing the nature of human beings and how we should live in the world as it is, i.e. ethics, and then how we should live together, i.e., the field of politics. Now, if we understand the true nature of art we can see that art does fit on top of the other floors, since it requires all the other floors below to give it support. But in an important sense, the upper floors of art actually lead directly back to the basement, rather like one of those strange buildings in a science fiction story in which we keep going up, yet we end up in the basement instead of the penthouse. Good art is both penthouse -- in the sense that it is a glorious summation and culmination of all that is below it -- and it is also basement, because it is both fundamentally necessary to human survival (witness the cave scratchings of even primitive men, who sought to find meaning in his world) and also intensely explicative of our own deepest metaphysical value judgments. Deep art really does go deep: right down to the bottom floor. Why, then, is art so intensely personal? If it’s just a higher form of abstraction, why do we so readily get up in arms over it? Again, it is because of the nature of the human mind. We are endowed not just with a cognitive mechanism, but also with an emotional mechanism. “It is man’s cognitive faculty … that determines the content of both.” The premises and abstractions we form and accept are the programming for our subconscious: based on this ‘subconscious programming,’ our emotional faculty provides us inexorably with lightning-like evaluations of the things we see and experience around us -- the extent of our emotion at these experiences is the extent of the import and resonance they have for us. As Ayn Rand said when identifying the nature of our emotions, they offer a lightning-like evaluation of the things around us. But our emotions do not spring from nowhere; they themselves are “an effect, not a cause.” Every single thing we see or experience is value-laden. It is our previous thinking (or lack thereof) that determines the nature of the evaluation. If one has finished a hard day’s work and sees a beer, one might feel a fierce thirst and a yearning to sit down and enjoy it; if one’s a poor student and sees an exam paper, one might feel nausea and a desire to escape the classroom; but if one is a human being with a healthy soul, and one hears Beethoven’s Ninth or sees Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, then one feels exalted. The difference in the feelings is determined by what it is we experience. The intensity of feeling is the measure of the extent of the intellectual and emotional abstractions subsumed. Why does great art move us? Because it speaks to the whole of us, and to everything we know and stand for. Who needs great art? You do.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Tax “reform.” It’s not rocket science, it’s theft. [Update 3]

There’s one aspect only of the Tax Reform Group’s recommendations I have any time for: If NZ is going to be wealthier, then NZers need to consume less and produce more.

Fair enough. The intelligent commentator distinguishes between the two: consumptive expenditure uses up stuff without replacing it; whereas productive expenditure uses up stuff in order to create more stuff. The more productive spending, the more productive we are. The more consumption spending we do, the less productive we are (especially if we’re consuming our capital.)

This is just basic economics, but it’s ironic that it’s being said in the same spending season as all the Keynesians are talking up spending as if it’s the cure to syphilis.

So much for the consistency of mainstream economists.

So saying it makes sense, but (even given today’s rampant Keynesianism) it’s hardly a feat like discovering gravity to say it. Because if they have the intelligence they are supposed to, they would recognise that the biggest consumer of stuff round here is the government—and recommend the government stop.

No such luck. instead they’re recommending that we give the government more.

So much for the “logic” and acumen of the Tax Reform Group.

And the government is talking up a change away from taxes on the production side at the same time as their Nick Smith is imposing new taxes on production to protect the Earth Mother Gaia.

So much for the “logic” and acumen of this government.

The Tax Reform Group insist that we give the government more (and have no fear that we will).

They insist on soaking residential property investors for example, and commentators like this moron over at Bernard Hickey's leap into print cheering on the increased rents on tenants and the tax-man’s hand being thrust into a new pocket. That moron is just one among many completely blind to the irony of giving tenants an accommodation supplement with one hand (which has helped push rents up to unsustainable levels), while taking the cash back with a tax on their landlord.

So much for the ability of economic commentators to know what the fuck is going on.

The only thing we can be sure of is that when anyone talks up a new tax, a legion of talking heads with nothing in them will leap up to cheer on the tax man. Soak the rich, soak the poor, soak the landlords, soak them more. That’s just the thing to get the commentariat cheering.

This latest bunch of academic done-nothings insist on a “new” tax on land, for example — and commentators like David Farrar and Bernard Hickey leap about excitedly, announcing that this new tax will (somehow) avert the growth of future housing bubbles. Commentators like David Farrar and Bernard Hickey say this despite evidence from all around the world that not one market that had such a thing managed to avoid any such thing; and evidence from here at home that we have pretty significant land taxes already, thank you very much.

And not only that, commentators like these two appear utterly oblivious to the all too obvious fact that the housing bubble was itself the product of a borrow-and-spend mentality flushing out of the system under the Reserve Bank’s impimatur (what George Reisman calls counterfeit capital), coupled with a restriction on land supply created by the toxic swill of ‘Smart Growth.’

An inflationary demand combined with restrictions on supply! Who would have thought you’d see a bubble!? Not these two, anyway. And not the Tax Reform Group either. (For an extra mark, work out what will happen bubble-wise when an additional tax is placed on the suppliers of developed land. Answers on a postcard please.)

There’s certainly more than one thing broken here, but the Tax Reform Group (and the various commentators who are mostly too dim to see past their next tax return, or the last economic report) just can’t see them.

So instead of trying to fix the country’s woes with a new tax, here’s a few home truths the Tax Reform Group failed to wrestle with but should have:

that the Reserve Bank’s credit spigot needs to be capped, and the country’s town planners need to be told to take a hike.

that if they’re serious about taking taxes off productivity, they immediately take an axe to their new cap-and-tax scheme. (Copenhagen’s over boys. No need to grandstand now.)

that if they’re serious about lowering the the “price” of rents, and with it the value of rental property, they think seriously about calling a halt to the Accommodation Supplement.

that if they’re serious about reducing consumption, then they get pretty damn serious about reducing their own (and the way to start that is to begin attacking the culture that demands that need is an entitlement).

If you want some sort of “step change,” those simple things need to come first.

UPDATE 1: Slight change in text and title. And the addition of a swear word.

“Libertarianz leader Richard McGrath said the National Government needs to grasp the nettle and slash state spending so that taxes can be reduced across the board. ““The agonising by Bill English over which taxes to cut, and which to increase, demonstrates a clear lack of direction,” he said. “This government clearly has no intention of reining in the profligate spending habits of its predecessor. And if it doesn’t stop spending, it has to keep taxing.” “My party can name dozens of departments, ministries and boards which could be axed tomorrow - and no-one would miss them. . .”

“All this talk of "tax neutrality" makes me rather ill. When you are running deficits you need to cut government spending. No talk of that is there? “I don't understand Hickey's crusade against landlords, perhaps he doesn't own a rental property. As for the depreciation on buildings - Farrar states most buildings don't depreciate in value? WTF? “If anyone has sold a rental property they would know a thing as ‘depreciation recovered’; that is, on any sale in which you make a gain, you have to pay the bloody deductions back in any case. “Fund Managers, NZX operators, share scammers - I can understand their self-interest on the Tax Working Group. Pity others can't. ”I'm independent of the matter having no NZ stocks or property. All it seems like is new ways to thieve from all walks of life. “The suggestions are so poor that we can now only put faith in English and Key that true to form they will decide it is all too bloody hard so they do nothing.”

A Complete Hiftory of Man According to Hif Divers Delightf — PART TWO: 'Making the Geniuf Quicker'

Strong is a king who destroys all, stronger still is a woman who obtains all, but strongest is wine, which drowns reason. Stronger still, however, is Truth and I who speak it.

Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before So, to summarise (from Part One yesterday, 'You Smell of Goat'): in the beginning all that existed was savagery and raw steak. And then, with bread and beer, civilisation was ushered in. (Bread and circuses were to come later.) Since beer and civilisation was something to celebrate, everybody did. For the next several thousands of years human beings would celebrate the arrival of beer by being variously bladdered, blotto, blathered and blagged (to use just four of the over one-thousand English words for being bevvied). Talk about overdoing a good thing. Fact is, the world was awash in ‘wastage.’ For some centuries the main source of nutrition for most families was beer. Lunch, dinner, supper—as a ‘warm beer soup it was drunk by men and women and children at every meal including breakfast – indeed, in most cases it was the meal’ -- and the world looked like you’d expect it to look after several thousand years of a serious session.

[New scene: A medieval city under siege[1]. Plague stalks the land. Camera pans to a small shit-laden hovel with a filthy leprous woman in the foreground. Suddenly, with a loud crash, a dead horse crawling with maggots and flung by a siege catapult crashes through the roof.]Women (turns to camera): I can’t wait for the Renaissance!

Two things happened to bring on the Renaissance: after a millennia-and-a-half of drinking, a few scholars sobered up long enough to begin reading what all those wine-sodden Classical Greeks had been banging on about. “Hey, this is good stuff!” they instantly hallelujahed. Artists and popes agreed, and celebrated by producing and commissioning some of the finest erotica the world has ever seen (and in the case of the popes themselves enacting it upstairs at the Vatican). But the world didn’t see any of it (especially what was gong on upstairs): it still took several centuries and Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press for the art and thought of the Renaissance to become widely available. And it took one more thing too -– it needed the rest of the population to sober up for a moment to read and savour what Gutenberg‘s copier produced. And what that took, in a word, was the invention of coffee. From out of Islam came this great redeemer, and his name was Suleiman the Magnificent. His rescue was quite inadvertent. When the Turks in 1529 left behind a few bags of their coffee at Suleiman’s failed siege of Vienna, we suddenly knew what to do when in the grip of a hangover, and our fuzzy brains began working again. Naturally, men began writing eulogies to the arrival of this exotic new intoxicant:

When the sweet poison of the Treacherous Grape[2]Had acted on the world a general rape; …Coffee arrives, that grave and wholesome LiquorThat heals the stomach and makes the genius quicker.

Coffee was the Great Redeemer:

It is a panacea…It dries the cold humours, dispels wind, strengthens the liver, it is the sovereign cure for hydropsy and scabies, it restores the heart, relives bellyache. Its steam in fact is recommended for fluxions of the eyes, buzzing in the ears, catarrh, rheum or heaviness of the nose, as you will.[3]

Coffee was great; coffee was it; coffee was the new new thing. And what coffee produced was a new kind of man, Homo coffea, and with it a new society that frowned on the excesses of the past. One in which reason was no longer drowned in a beer tun:

The massive, heavy body types of seventeenth-century paintings had their physiological explanation in high beer and beer-soup consumption… The insertion of coffee achieved chemically what the Protestants sought to fulfil spiritually [by] ‘drying’ up the beer-soaked bums and replacing them with ‘rationalistic, forward-looking bodies’ typical of the lean cynics of the nineteenth-century.[4]

The whole of Europe changed. People suddenly became sober and serious; thought and wit and rationality became valued; and business picked up as people stopped shooting each other and being knifed in pub brawls. The popular pastime of besieging each other’s cities stopped -- the Thirty Years War came to an end -- and the population began instead desperately seeking overseas supplies of this wonder drug. With coffee addiction came the immediate necessity of large scale foreign trade to keep the addiction fed: such was the beginning of the noble tradition of globalisation that Starbucks celebrates to this day. Coffee at once energised the brains of entrepreneur’s and gave them a goal: more coffee! And with it too came innovation! As Ayn Rand observed, animals survive by adapting themselves to their environment while humans flourish by adapting their environment to themselves. For too long people had concluded that all foods aside from beer quickly ‘go off’ so best just sup up and stay stoated. Although coffee itself didn’t replace the nutritional value that beer then provided, what it did do was sober people up enough to begin inventing ways of preserving foods, producing packaging and so making of food (and life) the man-made delight it had never been before. We today are the hearty beneficiaries of those sober and serious producers. Western civilisation rightly fell in love with coffee and the enlightenment it ushered in. Historians were so excited they capitalised the era: coffee ushered in The Age of Enlightenment. Western civilisation was again transformed for the better, industry and enterprise picked up, and in the coffee-houses of Europe two new revolutions were being planned, and executed.

NB: A special note for my American readers: You’ve probably never had a good coffee. Friends from NZ who live in the States tell me they’ve yet to meet an American barista who can make good coffee, or who have good beans to make it with. (One is tempted to say at cafes, “could I please have a medium latte with 3 shots and do you mind if I come back there and make it myself.”) There is hope however. ‘Albina Press’ in North Portland is reported to have good coffee. And ‘Mud’ in Manhattan. Any others?

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Perigo on ‘The Vote Heard Around the World?’

The Vote Heard Around the World?

Republican Scott Brown’s stunning victory in the election to fill the Senate seat formerly held by far-left shyster Edward Kennedy is a decisive indication that the American voters’ honeymoon with Barack Obama is over and they are clamoring for divorce, says SOLO Principal Lindsay Perigo. “Never mind their incomprehensible stupidity in entering this abusive relationship in the first place,” admonishes Perigo. “What’s important and reassuring is that they’ve awoken to the coercive, anti-American nature of their president ... and want out. “Mr. Obama won their hearts with his sweet-talk about change they could believe in. The actual change he has attempted to enact is from soft capitalism to hard socialism. “Scott Brown proudly promised to be the vote that derails Obama’s health care plan. This plan would make it compulsory for every American to take out health insurance—a shocking reversal of the relationship between the state and the individual laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Massachusetts voters who supported Obama in 2008 but voted for Brown today are citing health care as the reason for their switch. Mr. Obama and his fellow-socialists Pelosi and Reid have been told in no uncertain terms their Big Bossy Government agenda is not wanted. “It’s to be hoped that the rest of Obama’s toxic program is now equally destined for the ashcan of history. His proposed success taxes, his treasonous over-spending, his cap-and-trade scam, his decreeing that carbon is toxic, his takeover of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, his refusal to call terrorism ‘terrorism’ let alone name its Islamic roots, his gladhanding of dictators, his obeissance to union mafias, his diabolical determination to turn the Land of the Free into the United Socialist States of America ... let us hope his treason to liberty has been stopped in its totalitarian tracks. “This will require that voters, who showed themselves none too bright and none too American in 2008, keep faith with their awakening. It will require Republicans to repudiate their own socialist proclivities and present a genuine pro-freedom alternative to Mugabama in this year’s elections. It will require that the magnificent patriots of the Tea-Party movement keep up the pressure to take America back to its roots. “May today’s vote be heard around the world, and obviate the need for another equally audible shot,” Perigo concludes.

A Complete Hiftory of Man According to Hif Divers Delightf. Part One: 'You Smell of Goat'

A brief history of the world based on several things that really matter . . .

“ ‘Tis better to be a good liver than to have one.”Tom Waits

Man’s recorded history begins on the plains. When wildebeest and wild beasts roamed the plains thousands of years ago, early man roamed with them ... and often provided them with a good meal. Life for early man for most of those thousands of years was just as Thomas Hobbes described it : nasty, brutish and short. The battle for survival was a daily challenge; the threat of imminent oblivion all that drove men forward; Hunting and gathering whatever could be scavenged the only way to fend off starvation. In such a primitive struggle, man’s mind was of little use : native cunning and primitive tool-making were highly valued; long-range thinking was not. A successful hunt was all such creatures had to celebrate: a high point in such an existence would be to roast another wild beast over an open fire. For a brief moment in their short and brutal lives their bellies would be full, their bodies warm, and their thoughts could (at last!) roam to higher things. They had bought themselves time to think. What great realisations did they come to? After much skull-sweat they concluded that , in the immortal words of Tom Waits, 'twere better to be a good liver than to have one. On such nights, and over the course of those thousands of year of struggle, there was one thought, one goal, that drove these men forwards: the idea of beer! That’s right. Beer. The first step away from the caves and that precarious existence of the hunter-gather came with the cultivation in Mesopotamia of grains and cereals. With this important step man had begun thinking long-range; he had begun to plan ahead … a season … then a year … then several years in advance. Rather than roaming far and wide for whatever he could find, he could instead settle down, build a house, raise a family, have a beer, start a civilisation. The planting and harvesting of grains and cereals represented the arrival on this earth of man the-rational-animal; and for the first time it could be clearly seen that man’s mind was his chief tool of survival. Man had put his mind to work, and for the first time flourishing replaced survival. And what was all that grain and all those cereals for? Why, for beer of course! And bread. If bread was the staff of life, then beer was its inspiration. With bread came sustenance; with beer came civilisation. If the symbol of that first phase of primitive human development was a wild beast gnawing on the roasted limb of another wild beast, then the mark of the next was several pitchers of beer, and happy people consuming them. Beer was the first example of men expending precious time and effort producing something not just for survival, but for their own pleasure! And with the time bought by cultivation, men could now devise stories to entertain themselves while drinking beer. And curiously, many of these tales involved stories of extensive imbibition and getting seriously bladdered. How times have changed. The first of man’s great stories-and the very birth of literature--is ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh,’ a tale describing the evolution of man from the primitive to the cultured. This perhaps the first of man ‘s great creation myths, and also the first recorded instance of a great drinking songs. So if civilisation began with beer, then literature began with a drinking song. (Sounds like a good story to me. ) In the epic we hear tell of the whore sent by Gilgamesh to the savage Enkidu, who teaches him what it is to be human. “She [gave Enkidu] bread to eat, because that’s what humans do, and beer to drink, because that’s what civilised people do”:[1]

‘Drink beer the custom of the land.’Beer he drank – seven goblets.His spirit was loosened.He became hilarious [don’t we all!].His heart was glad and his face shone.

Enkidu drank beer, became hilarious, became glad – and in doing so became human. The Mesopotamians had their own popular drinking song. A rather odd one, suggesting that Mesopotamian lager louts liked rather fancied dressing up:

Sweet beer is in the Buninu barrel.Cup-bearer, waiter-waitress, servants and brewer gather around.When I have abundance of beer,I feel great. I feel wonderful.By the beer, I am happy.My heart is full of joy, my liver is full of luck.When I am full of gladness, my liver wears the dress befitting a queen.

The only think left to add is a hiccup. And a belch. And to wonder what sort of visions the Mesopotamian liver was conjuring up!

African myth includes an early version of the story of Pandora’s Box: in this version at the bottom of the empty casket is found, not hope exactly, but a gourd of beer. ‘Forget the afterlife and redemption by the gods,’ this story seems to say: ‘be happy with your lot, because to you is given beer.’ So beer puts the gods in their proper place for the first time: Where primitive men would fearfully seek to propitiate the cruel and fickle gods for one more day of a brutal existence, civilised men instead called on their gods to assist in the tricky processes of cultivation and fermentation. It is thus no accident that religion quickly associated itself with beer: to this day, beer recipes from Belgian monks are still highly prized. Even the murderous Aztecs were not found wanting: if you weren’t completely cunted at Aztec religious rites your head became forfeit to the priests. The message seemed to be that as drunkenness was a gift from the gods, it must be so honoured. Now there’s a religious morality you can subscribe to!

So beer built civilisation: it was what were getting civilised for. The Sumerians, the Aztecs, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Romans, the Teutons … all took the happy accident of fermentation and with it made their crops last longer and their short lives better. Beer was good. Beer was popular. Beer was the reason we were here. The Egyptians for example used up to forty percent of their harvests to make beer. Bousa (or bouza) as one type was called (yes, it’s true!) was the staple of the Egyptian diet; the pyramids were paid for with another type known as kash. Clearly, the urge to go out to work to earn drinking vouchers and spend them down the boozer is a long-established mark of civilisation. In this way life was made much better for the next few thousands of years, which was important since for many other reasons life – outside beer and its associated revels – was still shit.Aside from a few brief, glorious years in Ancient Greece -- in which philosophy, art and science were very soberly invented -- getting mothered was the only reliable pleasure to be had across most of the Dark Ages and in most of the world. To understand Europe for most of this time, think Nebraska on a slow weekend – you had the choice of either church or beer. The best you could say was that most monks were good brewers! In fact, much of the Dark Ages might well be explained by the fact that most of the people for most of the time were munted. And who wouldn’t want to be. In an age when the water was disgusting and food was once again scarce and difficult to keep fresh, beer had become the chief source of daily nutrients. The average Northern European, every man, women and child, drank three litres of beer a day – and this is real beer we’re talking about, not today’s girly muck, with much higher alcohol content than the lolly-water of Messrs Budweiser and Miller. (Nordics were even harder: the daily ration for Finnish soldiers was the equivalent of forty cans of strong beer. No wonder the Vikings were fearless)

If you’re at all interested in history then, try drinking three litres of Tennents Super or Carlsberg Elephant beer every day and see how you feel, and then think about that when you study European history because that’s what most Europeans were filling up their history with:

Almost everything had some liquor in it, especially medicines. Anything not deliberately fermented went off in the summer heat. In winter, beer froze, causing the alcohol to separate into high-proof liquor… To make matters worse, the main non-alcoholic source of nutrition, bread, is now believed to have been plagued with the hallucinogenic fungus ergot, the base ingredient for LSD. Drunk doctors, tipsy politicians, hung-over generals: the plague, famine and war. Add a pope on acid and medieval Christianity begins to make a whole lot of sense.[2]

How seriously did Europeans take their drinking? Here’s one measure: The Eskimos have twenty-three words to describe snow, but the English language has over one thousand to describe getting hammered.[3] Little wonder. Being bollocksed in fact explains much English history, as for most of their history the English spent most of their time getting trolleyed. After encountering the arseholed Ancient Britons, Julius Caesar (more used to the pleasures of the grape than the hops), asked in an ode :

Who made you and from what?By the true Bacchus I know you not.He smells of nectarBut you smell of goat.

High praise indeed! It wasn’t just the Britons yore who were getting trollied either. King Harold’s much later fall at the Battle of Hastings (on that famous date of 1066) was ascribed by twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury to the fact that the boys were still hung-over from celebrating an earlier victory over the Vikings. Echoing the much later charge of the Light Brigade (and the more recent invasions of England’s Barmy Army and its football hooligans), Malmesbury describes the English fighting “more with rashness and precipitate fury than with military skill.” Even Queen Elizabeth I indulged, supping her beer soup at breakfast and washing it down with a quart of the warm flat stuff - 'an excellent wash' she called it. When she visited Hatfield House her off-sider the Earl of Leicester hastily wrote to Lord Burleigh, "There is not one drop of good drink or here there. We were fain to send to London and Kenilworth and divers other places where ale was: her own beer was so strong as there was no man able to drink it." [4]The Scots (or the Picts as they used to called themselves) were even more serious about getting gewgawed: they made their beer one part malt to two parts heather. The heather, it turns out, contains a natural hallucinogen called fogg, which is somewhat descriptive and explains something about the Scottish enthusiasm for their beer today -- including the Tennents Super of today - and very much about their tactics in battle. Arseholed they may have been for most of their history, but it was from the drunken shambolic British that we got the idea of liberty. Common law and the Magna Carta were early English makeshifts, just the sort of Heath Robinsonisms you’d put together when drunk. It was a good start, but we had to endure half-a-millennia more before the ideas embodied within these could be properly developed and applied. What kicked off their proper development was a saviour from the East: in the twelfth-century European scholars began learning from their Muslim counterparts about the great thinkers forgotten in the European Dark Ages. The rebirth of those great thinkers was so powerful it kicked off the Renaissance—which, naturally, was enough to kick off another round of celebrations. Through the centuries of hangovers What Europe really need was to wake up. It needed another drink. And in the seventeenth-century Europeans learnt from Islam of another wonder, and this special wonder helped to kick off the Enlightenment … And for knowledge of that pleasure and what came of it you will have to wait for Part Two.

To be continued . . .

[1]Man Walks into a Pub: A Sociable History of Beer, Pete Brown; Macmillan, 2003[2]The Devil’s Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History, Stewart Lee Allen; Soho Press, 2000.[3] Yes, it’s true! The fabulous and afore-referenced Man Walks into a Pub includes nearly 250 of these words, and author Pete Brown points out that there are a further 800-odd such words and phrases to be found in Jonathan Green’s Dictionary of Slang. As Brown comments: “It is clearly the work of an insane genius. Just so you know, the only other words that come close to having as many different slang terms as drunkenness are bonking, jobbies, wabs, the front bottom and the old chap. In itself this says more about our culture than most books could ever hope to.”[4] ibid

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

The New Deniers

“. . . a fairer tax system”? [update]

BILL ENGLISH HAS BEGUN his working year by talking up his plans for something he calls "a fairer tax system.” If that bromide is to mean anything at all, then there is only one possible means by which Bill English could deliver such a thing: By not spending so goddamn much.

That, however, is not on the agenda.

Pity, because there’s plenty of easily quashed boondoggles that any responsible Finance Minister would be eyeing up with a sharpened axe:

Cindy Kiro's Office for the Children's Commissioner

Peter Dunne's Families Commission

Paula Rebstock's Commerce Commission

David Lange's Ministry for Women's Affairs

Jim Anderton's Ministry of Economic Development

The Ministry of Youth Development

Asia New Zealand Foundation

The Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs

The Ministry for Maori Affairs

The Race Relations Conciliator

Alcohol Advisory Council of New Zealand

Action on Smoking Hysteria

Electricity Commission

Energy Efficiency & Conservation Authority

The National Advisory Council on the Employment of Women

The Department of Labour

Welfare for Working Families

That's just a few of the bureaucratic sacred cows that any responsible government should have in their sights when they’re talking about “fairer” taxes. If Bill really did want to relieve the burden of big government from New Zealand taxpayers, then those troughs for time-servers should all be wearing a target.

BUT CUTTING SPENDING IS not on the agenda of Sir Double Dipton. Shuffling around the means by which he fleeces us is.

As Billy Bob and his boys have already signalled, what they mean by the bromide of “a fairer tax system” is simply a slight fall in income tax and a huge hike in GST and Land Tax—a cynical piece of sleight of hand that will allow them to sock all New Zealanders while pretending they’ve belatedly kept their election promise to deliver income tax cuts.

There’s no possible way there’s anything “fair” about whacking up the price of land, or the price of everything everywhere. There’s nothing responsible about making everything more expensive just to pay for this over-spending government, no matter how many worthies say otherwise.

MOST OF THE WORTHIES who talk about such things have been banging excitedly on for months about the prospect of a Land Tax—as if we don’t already have such a thing, and as if it would somehow have stopped the housing bubble from inflating.

It can only be abject ignorance that would allow any commentator to make either argument.

No Land Tax or Capital Gains Tax anywhere in the world stopped any housing bubble anywhere—it can only be blind faith that keeps anyone insisting it will.

And New Zealand land is already subject to iniquitous financial impositions. I look for example at a cost estimate prepared for a recent subdivision proposal in Auckland’s eastern suburbs, for which the grey ones will be putting their hands into someone’s pocket to the tune of around $40,000 per site, payable in advance. That’s a $40,000 dead weight on which a developer will be paying interest, and a new-home buyer will have to make up. That’s $40,000, plus GST!

Now if that’s not a Land Tax that every new-home buyer is already paying, then I’m a banana. And if there’s anything fair about whacking on higher taxes to New Zealanders who are already struggling, and consuming their savings as they do, then I’m a whole effing fruit salad.

“According to the NZ Herald, the Prime Minister said, ‘The Government would like to lower personal taxes.’ “Great stuff. “The solution involves two words. “CUT SPENDING. “Don't increase GST … “Don't create new taxes … “Think about this John. “If income and company tax were reduced to a simple 20% with the first $10k tax free (hardly radical and not Libertarianz policy), then how much MORE would that encourage a shift of investment from land to business?”

Monday, January 18, 2010

SUMMER SIX PACK: Democracy & Freedom. War & Theft. Oh, and I’ll take a side of warming, please.

Today’s selection of good reading from the archives trolley has now been served. Enjoy!

* * * *

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Global Warming? Just ignore it.

Politics behooves some folk to take a position on the science of Global Warming -- even if they really don't understand it. Find a person’s politics, and you’ll find them insisting either that Global Warming is happening and is real, or else is not happening and is a scam. And they’ll keep right on insisting, whatever the science says. That‘s neither good science, nor good politics. The libertarian position on Global Warming is somewhat different. It was well summed up by George Reisman at the end of his 1990 article 'The Toxicity of Environmentalism,' and his position on Global Warming is reprised today by Cafe Hayek:

“Let’s assume that global warming is happening and that it’s caused by modern human industry and commerce. Is there a case to be made for the United States government to continue to avoid signing the Kyoto Protocol? More generally, is there a case to be made to shrug our shoulders and say ‘best not to do anything through government about global warming’? “I think so.”

The best way for aspiring politicians to treat all claims about Global Warming is benign political neglect Read on here for the argument.

Don't steal ideas!

Copyrights, patents, trade marks—intellectual property is just as real, just as valuable, as real property. And rights to Intellectual property rights are ust as important, and just as much under attack -- and from some odd quarters. Greg Perkins at Noodle Food answers several libertarian critics of intellectual property rights, who argue that “intellectual property” is a contradiction in terms. There is a contradiction here, says Perkins, and it’s in the flawed way that the libertarians justify their theft of private property. Frankly, if you want a right to something someone else has created, then trading value for value as honest citizens do is a better method than using straw men, sophistry and theft, as politicians and (some) philosophy students do.

Whatever happened to your "smokestack socialist"?

I asked yesterday if readers could identify the author of this remarkably vigorous piece of prose in praise of human production:

“The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all the preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents or cultivation, canalisation or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground - what earlier century had even an inkling that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”

Written in the mid-nineteenth century, their author achieved worldwide popularity in the twentieth. How rare to hear such a hymn to human industry in the twenty-first. I'm delighted that several knowledgeable readers identified the author as one Karl Marx -- a surprise perhaps to some who know the bearded apostle of "scientific socialism" only as the god of today's braindead man-haters. How come, you might ask, we so rarely hear such hairy-chested sentiments from socialists these days? The answer is quite simple: the abject failure of socialism to live up to the promise implied in the old fool's wee hymn to human production. In the beginning, everybody was (or seemed to be) a smokestack socialist. The old style hairy-chested, smokestack socialist revered capitalism’s forces of production--those colossal steam-driven productive forces; the subjection of nature by capital—they just wanted them shackled for themselves. The forces that in earlier centuries had "slumbered in the lap of social labour" were erupting out of the feudal past, and were to be shackled in the promise of a glorious socialist future! Communism, said Lenin, is "socialism plus electricity"! Communism, Nikita Kruschev told Richard Nixon, will "bury the west." For many a socialist, the optimistic voice of socialism did sounded like the voice of the sunlit future. Reason and science seemed to be on the side of the central planners. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of every socialist experiment ever tried, however, put paid to that dream. The revelation when the Berlin Wall fell that socialist Eastern Europe was no Utopia, but instead an economic, environmental and humanitarian basket case brought on a crisis for socialists worldwide—a crisis making it clear for all time that it was impossible to be an honest socialist. The laboratory experiment in West & East Berlin, and the utter misery of Eastern Europe, smacked everyone in the face like a cold halibut, and made one simple fact crystal clear: Socialism could not produce. Capitalism does. At this revelation, the smokestack socialist had three fundamental choices: either abandon his support for socialism, or for production, or for reason:

He could continue to revere production and human fecundity by abandoning socialism altogether (Christopher Hitchens is one of this honest breed), or he could try and shackle capitalist producers to his own socialist ends (Tony Blair, Jim Anderton and most of the Third Way 'social democrat' types adopted this approach).

Or: he could retain his socialism but abandon instead his praise of production and wealth. The environmental movement beckoned. In damning production he could continue the promotion of socialism as if nothing ever happened. If you've ever wondered at the take-over of the environmental movement worldwide by assorted Trotskyites, Maoists and Leninists, or by the number of Jim Anderton's former colleagues now at home in the 'Watermelon Party,' then this is your explanation.

Or: as Stephen Hicks so eloquently explains, he could abandon reason, science, and optimism altogether, and embrace instead the postmodern promotion of anti-reason, anti-science, double standards, and cynicism. As Hicks says in the thesis of his superb book Explaining Postmodernism, "the failure of [philosophy] made postmodernism possible; the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary." In his book, Hicks charts the failure and consequent “evolution” of socialism, which helps explain the apparent disappearance of the old “smokestack socialist”:

The fall of the Berlin Wall was the crisis that created this mostly misbegotten diaspora. And it's the reason now that an honest socialist is about as hard to find as an honest lawyer

* * * *

Friday, September 30, 2005

Global warming and the war in Iraq: The Link!

There is a link between global warming and the war in Iraq that I haven't seen picked up before, and it’s not without irony. The link is the concept of risk, and how it relates to the arguments given for action in each case. Since Irfan Khawaja spotted the link, I'll let him explain:

“Opponents of the Iraq war have typically argued that absent hard evidence of Iraqi WMD stockpiles, we had no business using force to disarm Iraq. In the case [of global warming], however, left-leaning environmentalists argue that absent hard evidence of danger, we're obliged to take drastic action.”

Scientists such as NASA scientist James Hansen go even further. Hansen thinks it was appropriate to sex up the evidence for global warming in order to gain attention for the unproven. Now however that the scientific gravy train is up and running (with him on it) he is revising his story. "Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue… Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic." Irfan's translation: "It might have been OK to deceive the public about global warming a few years ago, but now the game is up, so let's just tell the honest truth from here on out."

“Hansen's ‘principle’ here is an exact replica of the Bush Administration's strategy during 2002-2003 in discussing Iraqi WMD: emphasize extreme scenarios as a matter of consciousness-raising; then, when confronted with counter-evidence, ratchet things back and try haplessly to explain that the exaggerations, while exaggerated, did after all point to a real problem requiring a solution. Then pray that no one calls you on your squalid and stupid rhetorical manuever. Of course, if you are George Bush the Fundamentalist, your prayers will fail, and everyone will forever after say things like ‘Bush Lies--Soldiers Die.’ If you are an atheist environmentalist, on the other hand, your prayers will succeed and no one will notice your brazen manipulation of public opinion. Funny how that works. “Anyway, our environmentalists need to get their principles straight. Does weak evidence of a high-stakes event justify drastic action to prevent the event? I think it can--in both the Iraqi and global warming cases. But one can't have one's risk and eat it, too. One can't argue that 12 years of UN reports on Iraqi failure to disarm can be dismissed as ‘insufficient evidence of an imminent threat,’ while simultaneously insisting that weak evidence of global warming has to be played up so as to justify passing the Kyoto Treaty.”

Ian Ewen-Street is not on the environmental main highway

Is the reportedly lazy and ineffective Green MP Ian Ewen-Street going to National a sign of anything? Anything at all? And apart from Mr and Mrs Ewen-Street, does anyone really care? Looks like it, if you believe all those people reading so much into this move. Could it really be a sign, as some commentators and Don Brash have said, that National are "serious about the environment"? Or that National is a broad church--encompassing both the lazy and ineffective Ewen-Street and the similarly qualified Tau Henare? Or perhaps a sign (as Jeanette Fitzsimons indicated) that Ewen-Street was always a Tory anyway? Or something else -- or even, perhaps, nothing at all? For mine it's Answer D: something else. As usual, DPF supplies the clue: "It is incredibly frustrating [says Farrar]that the hard left have captured so much of the environmental brand, and this should help correct that perception." So it's not so much that "National are serious about the environment" but that they’re serious about looking like they’re serious. And that's it, really, folks: This is all about perception, not about substance. The 'centre-right' would like to massage the perception, while the substance will barely change. Ewen-Street is hardly someone upon which to base any substance in any case – not at least in a freedom-loving direction. I really hope this idiot is really as lazy and ineffective as reports would have it, because the prospect of the anti-GE Green Ewen-Street and the man who called the RMA "far-sighted environmental legislation" (Nick Smith) writing National's environmental policy between them is not something from which to expect anything substantially less wet or less 'left' environmentally than what the Nats already have. The hard left have already captured so much of the environmental brand; so much so that lokking like you’re “serious about the environment” now means outbidding the hard left for environmental credibility. The hard left have captured the environmental brand for one very simple reason: Because almost the entire political spectrum, including the self-described 'centre-right,' have accepted the nostrum that environmental protection requires command-and-control measures to be effective: amd no-one does command0and control like the hard left . But environmental protection doesn't require command-and-control, and it’s time for those who aren’t hard left to realise that. The best means for environmental protection is secure property rights. When the non-hard-left parts of the political spectrum begin to realise that secure property rights provide both superior environmental protection and protection of your freedom, then we might be on the road to seeing something new. Something of substance. Something like that which is happening in the States, where alumni of property-rights-promoters like PERC have been getting their feet under the policy table. That really would be the right road down which to travel. That would be an environmental main highway to get on to. But Ian Ewen-Street is not on that road, and neither is Nick Smith or National. How about you?

A joke at the heart of Climate Change

It's hilarious, really, isn't it. Why am I laughing? If you haven't heard already, here's the joke: plants are implicated in the 'global warming problem.' Here's how: Methane is roughly twenty times more powerful than carbon dioxide in trapping the sun's heat -- it is the third most important greenhouse gas behind water vapour and carbon dioxide -- and a new scientific study has just discovered that "living plants may emit almost a third of the methane entering the Earth's atmosphere. The result has come as a shock to climate scientists." This is a genuinely remarkable result," said Richard Betts of the climate change monitoring organisation the Hadley Centre." [Source, The Guardian] I swear I am not making this up. Living plants, especially 'deep-rooted' plants such as trees, contribute about one third of the atmospehere's methane, with the Amazon Basin itself responsible for a hefty proportion. Cow farts and rice paddies are largely responsible for the other two thirds. Notes JunkScience.Com (who note also that the potential temperature saving by the year 2050 so far achieved by Kyoto is 0.001412424 °C):

“So, in the space of a couple of weeks we've had temperate forests harvesting too much sunlight and warming the globe, high latitude forest trees getting 'skinnier' and absorbing less carbon than guesstimated and now, tropical forests as a source of the much more potent greenhouse gas, methane. Anyone get the feeling wannabe energy rationers are getting really desperate to deny there could be any possible avenue to mitigate warming other than ceding control of energy? “Anyone noticed that, despite the gales of hysteria, the alleged warming of ~0.7 °C over the 20th Century is about the same as the error range on estimated global mean temperature? Anyone noticed that, while atmospheric carbon levels have measurably increased and global temperature has probably increased, crop yields have more than kept pace with human population growth from ~1.7 billion to over 6 billion while hunger has declined? Anyone noticed that during this time developed nations have returned marginal farmlands to forest and wildlife habitat? Anyone figure the global picture may not be quite as bleak as wannabe energy rationers would like to paint it?”

Maybe now we might see an end to the environmentalists' call for an Anti-Industrial Revolution. I look forward instead to Greenpeace T-shirts like this one:

Democracy vs. freedom: A Middle Eastern case study

"Democracy is freedom!" I hear you say? Well, no it isn't. There's much confusion abroad about structures of government, and too little understanding of the difference between democracy and constitutional government. Many people mistakenly believe that democracy is synonymous with freedom, so if you're saddled with that delusion yourself then you're not alone. It isn't. As Bill Weddell used to say, democracy is not freedom, it is simply the counting of heads regardless of content. And as Yaron Brook points out in The Forward Strategy for Failure, democratic elections across the Middle East that seemed to promise so much have demonstrated instead that the result of counting empty heads will often deliver the opposite of freedom. It's a lesson that we should all ponder.

“Iraq has had not just one, but several popular elections, as well as a referendum on a new constitution written by Iraqi leaders; with U.S. endorsement and prompting, the Palestinians held what international monitors declared were fair elections; and Egypt’s authoritarian regime, under pressure from Washington, allowed the first contested parliamentary elections in more than a decade. Elections were held as well in Lebanon (parliamentary) and Saudi Arabia (municipal). In sum, these developments seemed to indicate a salutary political awakening. The forward march toward ‘liberty in other nations’ seemed irresistible ...”

It all looked so promising, didn't it, and - let's face it - we all got excited at the sight of so many so eager to vote in places for which any idea of free and fair elections seemed just a few years ago so unbelievable. I confess, I did too. The Bush Administration's "forward strategy for freedom" seemed to be working, it seemed to be worthy of celebration - but the strategy had and has a fatal flaw. It was and is based solely on the introduction of democracy, and democracy itself is no guarantee of freedom. A majority can just as easily to vote away its own freedoms and those of minorities as it will to have them protected. Case in point: Recent history. "Has the democracy crusade moved us toward peace and freedom in the Middle East—and greater security at home?" asks Brook. Answer, NO! Emphatically not. For the most part, the results have been the opposite of stellar.

“The elections in Iraq were touted as an outstanding success for America, but the new Iraqi government is far from friendly. It is dominated by a Shiite alliance led by the Islamic Daawa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)... Teheran is thought to have a firm grip on the levers of power within Iraq’s government, and it actively arms and funds anti-American insurgents. The fundamental principle of Iraq’s new constitution—as of Iran’s totalitarian regime—is that Islam is inviolable. Instead of embracing pro-Western leaders, Iraqis have made a vicious Islamic warlord, Moqtada al-Sadr, one of the most powerful men in Iraqi politics...”

How about the elections in the Palestinian territories, then? Any more success there?

For years, Bush had asked Palestinians “to elect new leaders, . . . not compromised by terror.” And, finally, in the U.S.-endorsed elections of January 2006, the Palestinians did turn their backs on the cronies of Yasser Arafat; they rejected the incumbent leadership of Fatah—and elected the even more militant killers of Hamas: an Islamist group notorious for suicide bombings. Hamas won by a landslide and now rules the Palestinian territories. Refusing to recognize Israel’s legitimacy, Hamas is committed to annihilating that state and establishing a totalitarian Islamic regime.

Since writing that, as you probably know, Palestine has collapsed in what is essentially a civil war between Fatah and Hamas, with the price of war being paid in Palestinian bodies and an increased threat to the territories' neighbours, rather than a reduced one. No increase in freedom here either, then, or security. How about Lebanon, where great hopes were held for a rebirth in peace and freedom after elections that followed the drumming out of Syrian-controlled puppets? Sadly, the results there offer little cause for hope either.

“Hezbollah took part in the U.S.-endorsed elections in Lebanon, formed part of that country’s cabinet for the first time, and won control of two ministries.11 In the summer of 2006, the Iranian-backed Hamas and Hezbollah killed and kidnapped Israeli soldiers—and precipitated a month-long war in the region. Since the ceasefire that ended the war, Hezbollah has continued to amass weapons and foment terrorism, emboldened by its popular electoral support.”

So no success with recent democracies in Iraq, Lebanon or the Palestinian territories then - majorities have simply voted in totalitarians and killers who've acted to snuff out whatever shoots of freedom that we all fervently believed were beginning to appear. Perhaps elections in Egypt provide more hope? Sadly, the biggest beneficiary of the 2005 election was the Muslim Brotherhood, which as Brook points out represent "the intellectual origin of the Islamist movement, whose offshoots include Hamas and parts of Al Qaeda. The Brotherhood’s founding credo is 'Allah is our goal; the Koran is our constitution; the Prophet is our leader; Struggle is our way; and death in the path of Allah is our highest aspiration'” ! It seems that the "forward strategy of freedom" of implementing democracy in the Middle East is an abject failure - a failure made inevitable by the pathetic faith in democracy to deliver that freedom. As Brook summarises, what democracy in the Middle East actually delivered was the very opposite of freedom: it delivered more power to those enemies of freedom that the Bush strategy was supposed to snuff out.

“The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah, the Islamist regime in Iran, the Mahdi Army, Al Qaeda—these are all part of an ideological movement: Islamic Totalitarianism. Although differing on some details and in tactics, all of these groups share the movement’s basic goal of enslaving the entire Middle East, and then the rest of the world, under a totalitarian regime ruled by Islamic law. “The totalitarians will use any means to achieve their goal—terrorism, if it proves effective; all-out war, if they can win; and politics, if it can bring them power over whole countries. “Bush’s forward strategy has helped usher in a new era in the Middle East: By its promotion of elections, it has paved the road for Islamists to grab political power and to ease into office with the air of legitimacy and without the cost of bombs or bullets. Naturally, totalitarians across the region are encouraged. They exhibit a renewed sense of confidence. The Iran-Hamas-Hezbollah war against Israel last summer is one major symptom of that confidence; another is Iran’s naked belligerence through insurgent proxies in Iraq, and its righteously defiant pursuit of nuclear technology. “The situation in the Middle East is worse for America today than it was in the wake of 9/11...”

And worse too for the Middle East. Without a culture that values freedom and a constitutional structure that protects life and liberty, any nascent democracy is simply a hostage to whatever outrageous fortunes may sweep across a country, just as they did in the Weimar Germany of the 1930s. It seems clear enough that democracy alone is not enough to either preserve or introduce liberty and freedom, and it now seems abundantly clear that the strategists of the Bush Administration are entirely ignorant of that point - but it's also clear that they're not alone in that ignorance. Americans themselves will mostly tell you they live in a democracy, but in saying that they'd be wrong. The model of government introduced to America by its founding fathers was the most successful historic example of constitutional protections of liberty. America is not a democracy, it's a constitutional republic. For nearly one-hundred and fifty years the constitution introduced by the founding fathers and the enlightenment culture derived largely from sixteenth-century Britain between them provided the best protector for freedom the world in all its dark history had yet seen. It was a model introduced successfully in part to Japan after WWII, but all too sadly forgotten in the recent Middle East forays. No matter what you've heard, and no matter how many American strategists insist upon it, America's model of government is not a democracy. In fact, the founding fathers were assiduous in protecting liberty from the threat of unlimited majority rule that democracy delivers. What they did was put the things of importance beyond the vote, delivering to the world not a democracy but a constitutional republic. (Yes, I've repeated the point. It bears repeating.) The system of checks and balances of the United States Constitution was described by Ayn Rand as "the great American achievement." It is an achievement richly deserving of study, and (with some few modifications) of emulating. A nice summary of the workings of that successful Constitution is provided by a new course offered by the Ayn Rand Institute:

“A Constitution is "[t]he system or body of fundamental principles according to which a nation, state, or body politic is constituted and governed." “Paraphrasing Ayn Rand, a proper government protects men from criminals and foreign invaders and provides for the settlement of disputes according to objective laws. A government, therefore, does three things: it makes laws (the legislative function), enforces them (the executive function) and runs law courts (the judicial function). The United States Constitution divides these functions into separate departments; this is the doctrine of separation of powers. It also divides governmental powers between the state and federal governments by enumerating the powers of the latter and by specific limitations on both. Thus, both the federal and the state governments have sufficient powers to secure rights and are limited in their ability to violate them.

Simple but effective. Not democracy then but constitutional government - a constitution protecting essential liberties through a government constrained only to those protections. It's a model that failed states and would-be freedom fighters around the world would do well to understand and to emulate, as should those who unthinkingly parrot the idea that democracy alone is a saviour. It's not.

* * * *

Thanks for reading. Here’s a Serge Gainsbourg song, ‘Lemon Incest’:

“The music is a Chopin air, but the lyrics are all Gainsbourg. . .” Most of your other questions about it will find answers hereand here. Most of them.

Himalayan meltdown [update]

“Hide the decline” is no longer just a phrase used in Phil Jones’s emails—and the world and his wife are now hip to the legerdemain of Jones’s CRU.

And the UN’s IPCC—the scientific central planning unit to whom every warmist and his wet dream make obeisance—are now exposed as desperate, if not yet dateless: New Scientist magazine exposes the IPCC’s scientific credibility as something approaching zero. Tim Blair rounds up the story:

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.

But that news story must itself have had some rigorous science behind it, right? Wrong:

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Still, Hasnain is a scientist, so he wouldn’t have just been offering idle speculation, would he? He would:

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research.

Yet surely the IPCC had the sense to review this claim and not overplay it? They didn’t:

When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was “very high”. The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%.

The London Times summarises: “If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research.” Which is saying something.

UPDATE: Poneke has a must-read post. In real life, Poneke is (or was) one of the country’s top investigative journalists. His post should really be gracing the pages of one of the country’s top investigative journals . . . if we had one.

“This is the longest and most important article I’ve yet written for this blog and I make no apology for its 4600 words — more also than in any newspaper article. As a journalist, I believe the Climategate emails have exposed one of the most significant news stories of the decade. As the mainstream news media has so far barely gone beyond giving those who wrote them and their supporters time and space to deny their undeniable contents, I present here an extensive journalistic account of what they actually say in the context of the dates and events in which they were written, with full links to all the emails. “Having now read all the Climategate emails, I can conclusively say they demonstrate a level of scientific chicanery of the most appalling kind that deserves the widest possible public exposure. . . ”

Poor William

When I was a kid I remember being forced to stand out beside the road from the airport as a car alleged to contain the Queen of England whistled past. It must have been quite a sight. Thousands of small children and their teachers standing in ditches, fighting sunburn and waving small flags while holding up signs saying things like "Kia Ora Queenie."

Still, at least his neighbours tried to make him feel at home by flying his family flag (right)*. You have to make a Saxe-Coburg Gotha feel welcome, don’t you?

* Yes, that’s an Imperial German flag up there. Up until 1917 today’s Windsors revelled in the surname Saxe-Coburg Gotha—making them about as German as a pickelhaube. Their German name came from Victoria’s husband, Albert. Their new English name came from one of their castles.

Tip Jar

In America, they tip. In NZ, we shout beer. If you like the service here at Not PC, drop a tip in the tip jar and you can do both.

Recent
Comments

Who Needs Great Art?
Thanks for this post Peter.I enjoyed it & will continue to do so.

Lofty
I second Lofty's comment above Peter. That's another superb intellectual article for some of us non-intellectuals who visit here regularly to read. I enjoyed it. If I am a dean in one of our local journalism school in NZ, I would make it compulsory for students to read Not PC blog on a regular basis. They would definitely find interesting articles here, which would be stimulating to their wee (dumb) brain. They will come out better (after they finished) where their reporting capabilities improve dramatically.
Great post PC. Worth re-reading a few times.
I presume that kitsch painting of a nude over the peninsula is not included in great art.The Scream is great art because it reminds us that we should scream about the Holocaust etc but surely that sick making Soviet style realism of Christ over the rocks is not included in the Great Art lexicon.I mean, would you hang it in your living room?I am sure Frank Lloyd Wright would not have had it in sight.
Owen, all those four pieces to which I linked are great art--and that includes both the 'Icarus' to which you have such an aversion, and 'The Scream' to which I do.

They're not great art because of WHAT they say--in fact, what they say is diametrically opposed. They're great art because both have the scope, depth and integration necessary to convey their message. To illustrate the artist's metaphysical value judgements. To convey his worldview.

What an artist chooses to depict, and how he chooses to portray it are crucial. 'The Scream' and 'Icarus Landing' are perfect contrasts.

'The Scream' shows an alienated figure in a swirling vomit-coloured universe. It says that existence is fundamentally a struggle we can't win; that the world is chaotic, nauseating, irregular, swirling, alienating. Even the colours speak of nausea. It doesn't just "remind us" of the Holocaust, it says that this is a world in which Holocausts will always happen. That in this universe it's the Holocausts that are the given, and that it's human happiness that's accidental---if it occurs at all.

By contrast, 'Icarus Landing' shows the figure of myth who was supposed to have crashed after flying too close to the sun. But here he's not crashing, he's touching down under perfect control--arms spread Christ-like to show that in this artist's universe it's victory that we should celebrate, not sacrifice. So essentially 'Icarus' reclaims two myths of human sacrifice (Icarus and Christ) and makes them into one of triumph. It's stylised and sunlit. It says, essentially, that in this universe human triumph is possible, and is part of the natural order of things--and that sacrifice and disaster are the accidental.

You see, it's more than journalistic detail that you respond to. It's not just they remind us of evil things or of happy things that happen in the world. It's that they say either that this is a world in which evil wins; or (conversely) that good wins. That the universe is essentially malevolent, and opposed to human flourishing; or it's essentially benevolent and supports it.

That's why you respond with such vehemence. Because the images are so clear, your evaluation of their worldview is automatic.
You're not being clear PC. So the Scream is great art, but is the product of someone who views the universe as fundamentally malevolent? Do you think Munch's "metaphysical values" are toxic?

I'm genuinely interested. Do you think that the Scream improves the world by its presence, or would it be better if this great artwork never existed?

Judge Holden
PC

Re the Scream

"It says that existence is fundamentally a struggle we can't win; that the world is chaotic, nauseating, irregular, swirling, alienating. Even the colours speak of nausea. It doesn't just "remind us" of the Holocaust, it says that this is a world in which Holocausts will always happen."

I didn't know that about The Scream. I thought it related only to THE Holocaust and the message was that such things are aberations, they are not ever to be accepted, never to be allowed to occur again. The figure screams because of the alien wrongness of the Holocaust. Viewers can only imagine what was experienced.

The ability of the viewer to step back and escape from the painting (look away from it) allows him to realise that such things must not be allowed to be made real. It is important to come to that understanding.

Well, that's how I thought it went.

Can you go into some more detail about the painting.

LGM
The Scream was painted in 1893, so it wasn't specifically referring to the Holocaust.

Apparently the location depicted is near a slaughterhouse and a madhouse - a madhouse in which Munch's manic-depressive sister was interned.

PC, is there no place for art depicting negative emotions? Our lives contain both moments of happiness and joy, and times of depression and despair - to not depict the negative, at least sometimes, would appear to be denying reality, no?
Luke: The problem with "The Scream", IMO, isn't the emotions depicted in it; it's the attitude about value, and hence its sense of life.

You can indeed find great works of art expressing sad emotions, like "Lament for Icarus" that PC posted a while back.

The difference between "Lament for Icarus" and "The Scream" is that, in "Lament for Icarus" the idea of value (and life) is implicitly accepted, due to the women mourning over the death of Icarus - they have lost a great value. In "The Scream", what is portrayed is a world in which values are not possible and therefore, all life amounts to is a scream of despair.

Both portray sad emotions, but the sense of life couldn't be more different.

(Of course, this is all just my interpretation; feel free to disagree if you think otherwise).
Luke

I see.

I'll need to go find out some more about it.

---

Callum

Do you really think the painter is attempting to convey an attitude towards life in this painting or is he conveying only the state of the subject's suffering (his sister's?). how do you come to the conclusion that he's doing this?

LGM
LGM:

"Do you really think the painter is attempting to convey an attitude towards life in this painting or is he conveying only the state of the subject's suffering (his sister's?)"

The way through which he conveys the subject's suffering demonstrates the artist's sense of life. There are a number of ways suffering can be demonstrated (refer to my above comment discussing "Lament for Icarus"), and the way the artist chooses demonstrates his sense of life.

"how do you come to the conclusion that he's doing this?"

By looking at the picture and comparing it to others expressing similar emotions, and then looking at the way he chose to express those emotions.
Hi, I'm a fan of Not PC! I love Newberry's "Icarus Landing," and the commentor is correct that Frank Lloyd Wright would not have hung it, as he had few paintings to speak of in his interiors, for a number of reasons. I look forward to an NPC essay on humor in art, as I find it a common, if subtle, component. In fact, "The Scream" can be viewed as humorous, seen objectively. Tom White, Austin
Callum, it seems as if you don't like the Scream, because it doesn't adhere to the approved objectivist style (ie romantic realism) and thus must be evil. Prove me wrong.

Judge Holden
Callum

Thanks for that. It clarifies things.

LGMThis comment has been removed by the author.
Cheers LGM.
@LGM: "Do you really think the painter is attempting to convey an attitude towards life in this painting or is he conveying only the state of the subject's suffering (his sister's?). how do you come to the conclusion that he's doing this?"

PS Word verif = NONGS. So true.
Brilliant Post. I voted National because they said they would reign in and reverse the massive spending of the last decade not devise new ways of fleecing me. As a landlord I pretty much doubled my rent when the accomodation supplement came in. We bought another property last year, spent 30k renovating it all spent locally with GST, we sold it made a 28k profit on it and paid tax on the profit. Any particular reason why I should be burnt at the stake by Hickey et al. I guess gareth Morgan wanted my money in his dud super scheme or Weldon wanted it in his rubbish NZX or Shewin would prefer it on deposit in his clients (what tax rate should I pay) banks. Up them all i dont line in North Korea.
"And the addition of a swear word."

Keynesianism was already there...
@Anon

You are not alone - we find a lot of folk voted N/ACT to get rid of Hullun Cluck and her ghastly tax and spend finance minister and are now gutted to see all their hopes pretty well dashed.

Fact is the Nats could never really reduce taxes without cutting costs and reducing the size of the massive bureaucracy that Labour had built up - something the Nats lost the gonads to do once John Key was in the drivers seat.

But then, when have the Nats ever, ever made any serious attempt to reduce the size of government?

My advice to you as to all others in a similar spot is, to quote The Who "don't get fooled again".
Superb article PC and it's so true. Keep those insightful and intelligent blog posts coming.
Bernark Hickey is an idiot. He prefers to agree with or align himself to the socialist economic policies of both National & Liarbour.
Just in case anyone missed it, there is a Libz press release today offering Bill English suggestions on some money saving schemes.
Fantastic Peter, I waited for you to do the hard work this time critiquing these self-interested fuckwits.

All this talk of "tax neutrality" makes me rather ill. When you are running deficits you need to cut government spending. No talk of that is there?

I don't understand Hickey's crusade against landlords, perhaps he doesn't own a rental property. As for the depreciation on buildings - Farrar states most buildings don't depreciate in value? WTF?

If anyone has sold a rental property they would know a thing as "depreciation recovered", that is on sale if you make a gain you have to pay the bloody deductions back in any case.

I'm independent of the matter having no NZ stocks or property. All it seems like new ways to thieve from all walks of life.

The suggestions are so poor that we can now only put faith in English and Key that true to form they will decide it is all too bloody hard so they do nothing.
@Cactus

"If anyone has sold a rental property they would know a thing as "depreciation recovered", that is on sale if you make a gain you have to pay the bloody deductions back in any case."

In other words, don't ever dare to aspire to pay less tax by becoming something other than a wage earner. So much of "ambitious for New Zealand" right?
Cactus

"Fund Managers, NZX operators, share scammers - I can understand their self-interest on the TWG"

That's exactly the point! Those snivelling wee rortists are out to get hold of more of other people's wealth. If they can see to it that real estate is hobbled as an investment category, they expect that more people will come to them for investment "services" and "advice". Then they can charge more of their lovely commissions and fees. And then they can play all their tricks to separate people from their own money.

As someone who remembers seeing friends wiped out by these awful pricks in '87, '92, '99, '08 etc. my advice is under no circumstances should anyone ever invest in stocks (unless you know everything about the company you are investing in to great detail and precision) or a finance company (same deal about possessing specific and detailed knowledge) or a fund (see previous about knowing stuff). At least with real estate you can live in the place if necessary. You can see it and touch it every day. Give your money to the vermin and you'll never see which way it was taken from you. It'll be gone and consumed long before you realise (almost like govt!).

LGM
I do not disagree LGM, in fact that's one of my main point. The Group has been hijacked by those interested in bumping up Kiwisaver, the NZX etc.... boring. In other words, blindly handing over your money to supposed "experts" to manage for you when historically the NZ stockmarket tanks and cleans people out in the process. Housing has never done that.

Sean - YES!

Bloody hell now I will have to go read the thing to give it a proper damn good fisking that it deserves.
Only one person, ever, in the National Party had the strength of character, conviction and philosophical bent to cut the state - Ruth Richardson. She oversaw a big cull of quangoes in 1991, the cut in welfare benefits and single handedly ensure the enormous budget deficits that Labour created post Douglas lasted barely one electoral term.

For handing them that, the Nats knived her in the back after 1993. Of course it would be fair to say the majority of the sheeple (who voted Labour, Alliance and NZ First at the time, but thanks to FPP we were saved from that for three years) went along with it.

Muldoon was right that the public don't know what a budget deficit is, whether that still applies today is unclear.
I'm sick of Farrar's blog apologetic defense of everything the government does.

He is incapable of taking a hard line with his beloved National Party and deserves to be labelled as a true sycophant.

Farrar has no shame.

Key continues to hesitate. The guy is a wimp.
Erikter

Right on! David needs to decide what sort of political commentator he wants to be. Defender of the government in charge as at whatever day he likes to comment or get off the fence and attack stupidity.
is the Moron you allude to over at Hickey's blog Andrew VP of the NZPIA or one of the commenters thereafter, if so which one expactly do you take to task.Mort
@Mort: I'd thought it was a guest post, but it looks like the moron is Hickey himself.

Andrew Wilson is quite rightly berating what would be an orchestrated attack on residential property investors, and the best thing the slack-jawed Hickey can find to say in response to the outright theft proposed is "the world will not end," and "they can afford it."

What a complete and vicious bastard.This comment has been removed by the author.As someone who remembers seeing friends wiped out by these awful pricks in '87, '92, '99, '08 etc. my advice is under no circumstances should anyone ever invest in stocks (unless you know everything about the company you are investing in to great detail and precision) or a finance company (same deal about possessing specific and detailed knowledge) or a fund (see previous about knowing stuff).

Funny how personal responsibility flies out the window when it comes to risk and investment.

As far as finance coys are concerned I can tell you that the current malaise is not the least bit of a shock to anyone - at least not to those who were paying even a little attention.

You know who I feel sorry for in all of this? Absolutely no one. I can't imagine who it is I'm supposed to feel sorry for.

Oh and NZX is one of the best performing indexes in the world - despite what Cactus Kate says. No one gets wiped out unless they are totally stupid.
"No one gets wiped out unless they are totally stupid".

Most legislation is created Ruth with the intention that people are totally stupid.

While you may be educated in stocks, for most NZers not only is it foreign but they are inept at it. They also do not accept the risk involved. 1987 is still fresh in their minds.

While housing remains a risk-free investment, with no cyclical boom-bust, people will prefer it to stocks.

As for "best performing stock market" well last year that title I believe was won by Brazil, Russia, Peru and Indonesia coming next with Sri Lanka.

Any of your money going there?
Ruth

My comment was advice to other people who may or may not be interested in it. They are responsible for their own evaluations and decisions. Whether they take my advice or not is a matter for themselves. That IS their exercising of personal choice- a choice for which they ARE personally responsible.

How exactly does personal responsibility "fly out the wondow" because I presented some advice?

---

"No one gets wiped out unless they are totally stupid."

That is not what I've observed, Ruth. Still, let's bear it in mind when you experience a serious set-back.

---

Yes, the present recession/depression was no surprise, not to those who were familiar with Von Mises, Reisman, Shiff, Polleit, Shostak, Rogers etc. etc. etc.

---

As for the NZX, you have got to be making a joke. Surely?

LGM
Here are the returns for investors over a range of time periods for the various markets. (Note: All returns are in local currency terms, the results are period specific and 10 years is the more important number which, while not long, is indicative of the underlying trend).

Now given that *money is gold* - let's see what happened to gold over the 10 years if instead you had purchased gold instead of stocks:

Gold (USD) 1-year +27.0%, 10 Year +292.0%

Now since gold is money, you actually don't get a return from holding gold, you just hold the purchasing power of your money. Seems to me that an investment in any stock market could not keep up with the *significant* loss of value (purchasing power) caused by governments debasing their currencies. (Now, it is true, I have ignored currency changes but these were not that significant and therefore do not change the central lesson here - that governments (including the NZ government) have done immense damage to their economies and currencies and therefore the standard of living of their citizens.

Julian
I spent a bit of time looking at the performance of gold in each currency so as to better (and more fairly) compare the performance of each stock market over the last ten years.

Over last 10 years, on an annualised basis (which was the way I reported the stock market returns above - i.e. in the case of NZ stocks, 5.9% per year for 10 years) then the 'return' on gold was:

and the return for gold in US dollars was 14.7% on an annualised basis.

Again, usual caveats apply,(and I don't have the data at hand for the BRIC countries) but seems like the NZ, UK, Japanese, and US markets got nowhere near keeping up with changes in the purchasing power of their currencies (if you view gold as money). Australia fared better however, with their market's return approaching that of gold.

Julian
A Complete Hiftory of Man According to Hif Divers Delightf — PART TWO: 'Making the Geniuf Quicker'
A very enjoyable read with my coffee.
Very entertaining and enlightening. Ta.[1] Sounds like something out of a Monty Python movie.

DyannT
Blame the Chinese, it was their emissaries visit to Italy in the 15 century which sparked the renaissance. It was they brought tea and technology, in the form of prototypes of the magnificent european 'inventions' which came shortly thereafter.Blame is probably the wrong word unless you are a watermeoln, thanks is more appropriate!Mort
‘My Creed,’ by Dean Alfange
Here here.
This is wonderful. It has a touch of "Invictus" about it, at least to my ears.

Chris R.
very inspiring..
Damn straight!
Sorry to say but "The Creed" by Dean Alfange that is posted has been edited. A whole paragraph has been left out I guess rewriting history means changing what a man actually wrote and thought. This is that paragraph:

I will never cower before any master nor bend to any thread. It is my heritage to stand erect, proud and unafraid; to think and act for myself; enjoy the benefits of my creations and to face the world boldly and say, this I have done. All this is what it means to be an American.
Joe, read it again. The paragraph you are talking about is there.
Here is "My Creed" as I found it on the back of an advertisement. "I do not choose to be a common man. It is my right to be uncommon. I seek opportunity to develop whatever talents God gave me-not security. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the state look after me. I want to take the calculated risk; to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed. I refuse to barter incentive for a dole. I prefer the challenges of life to the guaranteed existence; the thrill of fulfillment to the stale calm of utopia. I will not trade freedom for beneficience nor my dignity for a handout. I will never cower before any earthly master nor bend to any threat. It is my heritage to stand erect, proud and unafraid; to think and act for myself, enjoy the benefit of my creation and to face the world boldly and say-"This with God's help, I have done." All this is what it means to be an American."
This is a truely Great poem by an American for Americans or those who seek to be one. After reading up on the man though, it is hard to understand that the mind that formed these words supported FDR and felt his "New Deal" didn't go far enough! I see it as a conflicting piece to the rest of his life.

Steel
This is a quote by Thomas Paine, and is consistent with HIS charachter, writings, and actions.
Perigo on ‘The Vote Heard Around the World?’
Obama just bumped up against the limits of spin and charisma. And how damned sweet it is!
The political analysts willl say:Its about healthcare, Obama, and Americas suspicion (dislike) of big government, big government programmes & Martha Coakley ran a dumb campaign.And to some extent they are right.

But I recall when I was living in the US that within a David Frost show Norman Mailer was interviewing Mohammad Ali just after there had been a similar big upset in US politics.

He suggested that Ali represented a general "distrust" of government because everyone knew he was heavyweight champion of the world but the Government insisted he wasn't.

It occurred to me that with Obama and his administration going on and on about global warming while everyone from Houston Northwards is suffering the coldest winter in yonks, that Americans may not have much faith in what government has to say about all those things.

It was a telling point about Ali at the time, and while I might be drawing a long bow it certainly came to mind today and the memory banks had to go back over forty years.
Interestingly, Owen I just read that one of Brown's campaign managers said internal polling revealed that most people were more concerned about domestic and foreign security than about healthcare!
Hopefully Perigo is starting to realise what all reasonable folk already know - that Obama will be removed in due course by the democratic process.

Murdering him - as he has suggested a few times - is not required.
I don't think voters in the US were stupid in the 2008 election. They voted Obama, because they themselves knew that they would get benefits from Obama policies/agendas that are clearly socialist (wealth redistribution).
Maybe, but some of the discussions I have seen have indicated that people are against the healthcare bill because it got watered-down and doesn't go far enough!
obviate: to get rid of, to clear away
Ruth

It depends on how soon people want him to be gone.

LGM
Ode to the taxman . . .
A Complete Hiftory of Man According to Hif Divers Delightf. Part One: 'You Smell of Goat'20 things worth knowing about beer
The New Deniers
Its not nice to fool Mother Nature. Yep, they are the new deniers for sure!
Love the graphic !Thanks...
“. . . a fairer tax system”? [update]
We have land taxes on existing properties, too - but we call them local body rates. One lot for the local council, one lot for the regional council. Very few people seem to see this... so the proposal is to levy three taxes on the same property, because you can bet your life the thieving bastards aren't going to *replace* existing taxes. They're just going to *add* to them.

Verification word is "folymaps" - a map describing the folly of land taxes, perhaps?

Richard
Putting aside the desire for private services, how much of that $40k would be "legitimately" covering the provision of connections for water, sewerage, roads, etc rather than bureaucratic crap?
@TWR: None of it. In the current example, provision of those services adds an additional sum of around $25,000 to each site.
Do you have any figures on how much those 'easily quashed boondogles' actually cost? I've always been interested in exactly *how* and where Government manages to bleed money so easily..
A 'fair' system might be one whereby I choose to pay for and receive state funded services - or not.
Only a moral pygmy could ever say that the theft of private property is "fair".

Julian
I would urge Bill English not to chop the The Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs (MPIA), since that department has been very active in recent months in South Auckland , advising Islanders of how to cook/bbq their pets properly (ie, dogs, cats, etc,...) so as not to offend the wider NZ populations.

A source in Mangere told me recently that they use this humane method that is being advised by MPIA in which they invited their European neighbour for the kai and they (neighbour) loved it. The neighbour didn't even call TV1, TV3 or even the Herald to come and join them for the BBQ.
Someone please get me out of this nightmare!

National = Labour but their supporters don't even get it...

The left hates National....but National is exactly the same as Labour.

The right bemoans Labour, yet their party IS Labour (with a different logo)

What's it going to take for this all to end? Complete collapse of life as we know it? Complete economic and social melt down? Do we have to end up like all the communist block countries just before they fell apart? Really?

Is the only way to get out of this to vote green and get it over and done with as quickly as possible?

Someone make it stop!!
PC

The $40,000 tax expropriated against each of those sites is $40,000 each of the new homeowners is going to have to pay (exactly as you say). That's $40,000 plus related fees above what they otherwise would have had to pay. The vast majority of people purchasing a home borrow money from the bank in order to be able to acquire said home. Over the life of a typical mortgage the extra $40,000 is going to cost them an extra $120,000 by the time it is paid off. That's $120,000 that they will need to earn (one way or another) and that won't be available for other purposes...

Fair?

Now watch the new Land Tax start to bite.

More fairness indeed.

Concentrated fairness.

Undiluted.

LGM
Anon said "what is it going to take ... complete economic and social meltdown?".

Isn't that what it's 'going to take' not to stop it, but to complete it. Total meltdown = perfect excuse to print money and buy up everything. A bloodless coup, just been happening all over the world to various degrees.

So is there anything for Nanny to fear in a meltdown? She just has to find some matrix-like way of keeping her flock busy, and apart from a handful of malcontents, sufficiently happy.
Watchman

You mean, something like a war?

LGM
LGM - was that a serious question?

No. I mean a complete takeover, a coup by the state without a war as such. It's do-able. Have a melt-down, then buy everything up. Just gotta keep the flock happy, trick them into thinking they own their property so as to keep them striving to acquire more, otherwise everyone loses interest and ends up sitting round and starving like in Zimbabwe.

Properity by illusion. Just enough to keep the whole thing going and to make it worth the conjurer's while.
I'm afraid anonymous is closer to the mark than I care to admit!

From where we are now, the fastest way forward will be to let them have their way and embrace the collapse, so that the grey ones may learn from their mistakes, and there is a clearer way forward - Unfortunately history also shows us that they NEVER learn from their mistakes - opting to do the same things that have failed in the past.

Were DOOMED - DOOMED Mr Mannering
Kid

You've been reading the news, right?

The recent 'crisis' has enabled governments all over to print money, nationalise assets and spread their grip. U think that bothers them?

The bigger the collapse, the worse it will be for you and me, Man, not for Nanny.
Watchman

No, it wasn't really a serious question. I was having a bit of fun. Having said that, last time things got real bad a war was arranged to mop up some excess people. It was a nice big one, as I recall.

Rocks.
I also like Matthew Percival for his amazing Australian Outback scapes.

The song on Albert Namatjira by "Not Drowning, Waving" is also a masterpiece.
SUMMER SIX PACK: Democracy & Freedom. War & Theft. Oh, and I’ll take a side of warming, please.
Thanks for the IP article Peter. Timely :)
Plenty of material to read here. Excellent stuff to print out and take on the holidays!

In relation to the IP article by Perkins....This was vigorously debated at the time it was published. As a summary of the Objectivist position it isn't a bad piece. On the other hand, it fails to adequately make good a case opposing the anti-IP aguments (the critique against patents, copyright and ideas as "property" etc) developed by Kinsella et al. It has since been reported that Kinella was not allowed to defend his position during the debate- he was banned from posting.

After working in the field of commericalisation of R&D effort for some years, I am unsatisfied with the arguments in support of the notion of treating ideas as property. They are not.

LGM
@LGM: On the contrary. Since Kinsella has no clue what justifies property at all (hint: the justification for property rights is not scarcity)--and no interest in learning the Objectivist arguments for property rights (hint: it's based on the production of new values)--he fails even to get his case against intellectual property off the ground.

And since you characterise the argument as being about "ideas as property," it's apparent that you haven't grasped the nub of the argument either.

I counsel re-reading Perkins' piece.

And BTW, Kinsella wasn't banned from posting in order to bar him from defending his position. He was barred from Noodle Food long before that because he was an oaf in the manner of Rodbeater. Behaviour has consequences.
PC

Your characterisation of Kinsella is quite incorrect. He certainly does understand the Objectivist position and rejects it for specific reasons (some of which he is at pains to outline in several papers and publications as I recall). Repeating inaccurate charges does not claify the situation.

With respect, you do not know Kinsella or his work very well. It is abundantly clear that you (and Perkins) are not addressing how his argument is structured (for a start it is worthwhile considering how Kinsella derives individual rights- he agrees in large part with Hoppe). Perkin's charge that Kinsella et al do not address "grapple with the meaning of individual rights in general, nor their still deeper basis in ethics, epistemology, and human nature" is false. So is much else of the article.

It would assist to read what Kinsella actually does say and consider it carefully. If you like I can pass on his contact details and you can ask him about his position and why he does not agree with Rand on this topic.

I am familiar with the circumstances of how he was silenced. Suffice to say the stock-in-trade hatred, villification and general silliness etc. present in elements of the Objectivist and "IP" fraternity were experienced by him on numerous occasions. That they did not present serious counter to his argument but reduced themselves to such a level shouts loud about the quality of their ideas. SK's parody of them got him banned. He is no Redbeater.

LGM
@LGM: Well, I don't agree. I don't agree with any of your points.

* I'm familiar with Kinsella's arguments, and I'm somewhat familiar with the Objectivist position--and there are only two possibilities: that he either understands the Objectivist position and dishonestly misrepresents it; or he doesn't understand it and doesn't care to, even when it's pointed out to him.In any case, either looks like dishonesty to me.As I said before, the basis of the Objectivist position is not based on scarcity . . .

* I have no interest in having Mr Kinsella's contact details. I consider him a dishonest individual.

* I am familiar with the circumstance of Mr Kinsella's banning from Noodle Food. It was unrelated to discussions on Intellectual Property.

* I consider the position of Mr Kinsella and his colleagues to be entirely consistent with their anti-government anarchism--in fact, rationalistically required by their anarchism.Murray Rothbard realised that an anarchist country could not provide a credible defence force, and so he repaired to the absurd notion (during the Cold War) that the Soviet Union were the good guys.In the same way, Mr Kinsella and his colleagues realise that an anarchist country could not credibly defend intellectual property, and so need to dismiss the whole concept.It's not reasonable, it's just rationalistm. Their ends require their means. And the result is theft of people's property.
PC

* I don't believe you really are very familiar with the fundamentals of Kinsella's argument or it's basis in Individual Rights. Greg Perkins certainly isn't (or is he merely being dishonest?).

By the way, "scarcity" is one of the fundamental attributes of that which is properly considered property. Rand may have chosen not to address it thoroughly. Nevertheless it remains important to understand what the concept is and the implications are. It IS one of the existant attributes of property...

* That was beneath you. Being seriously interested in the subject, rather than simply seeking to preserve a rigid dogmatic position, surely you'd have availed yourself of an opportunity to at least correspond with a leading intellect in the field?

In my experience of Stephan Kinsella, he has been readily approachable, unfailingly polite and obliging, generous with his time (prepared to share information, discuss issues and ideas, offer recommendation, answer questions etc.). He is professional and cordial. The smear of dishonesty is not accurate. Characterising him as that which he isn't is a poor excuse.

* I am aware of what occurred. As I pointed out, he was prevented from defending his position after committing the cardinal sin of parodying a certain faction. While it can be argued he should or should not have done that, the point is that he was not allowed to continue to defend his position during the "IP" debate. That's a shame. It may have been possible to arrive at a definitive conclusion had he been allowed to remain.

* Irrelevant to the issue. The issue at debate is understanding the nature of what is properly considered property, not personality, feelings or even the alleged superiority of minarchism versus anarchism.

My position is this. After dealing with the "IP" business for an extended period of time I am skeptical about whether what goes under the term "IP" can be properly thought of as property. As was well said, "The moral is the practical." Dealing with the morass that are patents, along with the vexatious related issues and activities, led me to consider very carefully whether "IP" was moral. It certainly isn't practical in my experience.

Perhaps the case can be made for "IP". So far I am a skeptic. The reams of tit-for-tat vitriol that passes for a defense of the concept have done little to demonstrate how "IP" could be valid. The anti-"IP" case is strong.

"Rand was a great thinker, but she also made great mistakes sometimes." - Chapman

My suspicion is this could well be one of those "sometimes".

BTW I've been meaning to read some more Rothbard, but never got around to it. Can you let me know where I can find his defense of the USSR as non-aggressor. I am curious about that one.

Well, I don't agre on either score. I think I'm capable of speaking for myself. And I think I'm capable of evaluating Mr Perkins' performance, which I'd rate very highly.

"By the way, "scarcity" is one of the fundamental attributes of that which is properly considered property."

Well, no it's not. It's not a fundamental attribute. "The source of property rights is the law of causality." - Ayn Rand, 'Galt's Speech' Man's mind brings new values into existence by rearranging the 'stuff' of existence - that's the starting pont of property. It's in that sense that Adam Mossoff says "all property is intellectual property." Understand that, and you'll understand what Mr Kinsella doesn't.For more on the derivation of property rights, I'd thoroughly recommend Tara Smith's 'Moral Rights & POlitical FReedom.'

* I don't regard Mr Kinsella as "a leading intellect." That's putting it politely. In my experience, across several years and seeing him in several fora, he is dishonest and disinterested in learning. That he works as a patent lawyer by day while trying to tear down intellectual property at night just gives you one example of his attitude to integrity. IMHO he is taking an outlandsh positon in order to make himself a big fish in a small pond. Good luck to him with that, but he won't be getting any help from me.

* He was ejected after pretending to be someone else. Mind you, it's easy to believe he was ejected more than once, so we may both be correct.

* Kinsella's anarchism is entirely relevant, since your anarchist needs to dismiss any need for the state, even at the expense of rationalistically dismissing any basis for it.At least Rothbard knew enough not to reject intellectual property. Though he did maintain, quite idiotically, that the US was more warlike than Nazi Germany, but the Soviet Union nder Stalin was "devoted ... to peace," and there was " no Russian expansion whatever apart from the exigencies of defeating Germany..." [You can read more on page 11 of your copy of his olf friend George Reisman's book. And while you're there, why not check out what George has to say about patents and copyrights and property rights.]

PS: Who the fuck is "Chapman"? Unless it's Graham Chapman from Monty Python, he sounds like a idiot.
There are 2 examples about IP issues that I want to bring up here:

#1) First one shows the ridiculousness of IP, where some have managed to file patents for something so generic, which stops everyone else from using the idea, let alone that the methods used in their claims weren't or haven't discovered/invented by the claimants themselves. The following patent shows exactly that:

Why is this ridiculous? Well, the methods described in the patent claim itself includes any use of fuzzy-logic inference system (FIS) and artificial neural network (ANN) for automated real-estate appraisal/property valuation. FIS was first developed in the 1970s and ANN was first developed in the 1940s were pre-existing technologies, ie, they weren't invented by the claimants of the patent above. Of course there are different variants of FIS and ANN that exist today, which are performing better than previous variants (ie, less error). Example is that ANN has got almost 100 different variants.

The patent is so generic that almost any superior variants of FIS and ANN (ie, low error rate) that will emerge in the future (ie, invented by someone else, etc) won't be of any use to the development of such software application as automated real-estate appraisal, since the patent itself bars anyone from using any types of FIS and any types of ANN in that domain.

Well this is wrong, and I have seen some prominent members of the software/IT communities that already voiced their concerns over issues like the patent above which is so generic, which is clearly ridiculous to grant the claimants one.

#2) Suppose that the methods described in the patent above are not generic but very specific. This means that the claimants have invented a new type of FIS and ANN algorithms that have never been available before and in their claim they should stated clearly that blue FIS and red ANN (lets say that what they called their new FIS and ANN variants that they have invented) use in automated real-estate appraisal (ARA) system are theirs. In this case, it is quite clear that anyone using blue FIS and red ANN for developing an ARA system is violating the patent. See, here it is quite clear cut. Let's say that Falafulu has just invented a new type of FIS and a new type of ANN which are both superior than anything in existence today. I should be allowed to develop a superior ARA system using my recently superior invented FIS and ANN, but I can't since the patent claim includes all types of FIS and all types of ANN, existing ones and ones that will be discovered in the future (non-existing one).

To summarize my points, I would say that I fully support the IP protection for original invention/development but not for generic ones (such as my example above), because there was no invention at all that involved in there. This means that I agree with LGM on one point and I also agree with PC on another point. IP is good, but it’s also ridiculous.
I've heard all sorts of things about Ian Ewen-Street. Apparently he lives in Nelson and is a former MP...
PC

* That is well, but it's hardly the entire story. Meanwhile "scarcity" is and remains ONE of the fundamental attributes of property. It is not possible to rationalise out of it. It's not the only attribute, nevertheless in its absence you aint dealing with that which is properly recognised as property.

"Values" are not property. Interestingly enough, the way the term is used varies according to whether you are speaking to Objectivists (who employ it as a noun) or certain Libertarians or certain economists (who employ it as a verb). A part of the troubles between some of these individuals relates to them talking past each other, employing the same term for different concepts. Some of the differences are subtle. Some of the differences are understood and observed. Some of the differences are down to deliberately being difficult and pretending not to be aware. Frustrating.

A concern I have considered at length is that there are breaks in the chain of logic going from formulation of an idea to construction of a novel & inventive device through to grant of power to expropriate a tax from other individuals who may use their own property to effect similar arrangement. As previously stated, there are significant practical and moral issues with IP. They are not trivially resolved.

Anyway, this material has been debated so often and with so many back-and-forth posts on various blogs that I suspect that were we to continue here it would be unlikely that there would be a resolution any time soon. It's probably a subject best discussed over a beer and chips.

* Now that's naughty. If you'd bothered to find out a little about the guy you'd have discovered that his practice is to defend clients against vexatious IP litigation. That's hardly inconsistent with his views on the invalidity of that which he is defending clients against.

* Could be.

* Most interesting, but not really relevant to what we were dealing with. The arguments need to be properly addressed in the first instance. The analysis of motivation etc. is secondary and can be addressed afterwards.

Yes, I read Reisman and was lucky enough to have corresponded with him on occasion (to seek clarifications on particular topics). I am familiar with his perspective on the validity of IP. Having said that I'll add that he is probably the best economist alive today.

I've read the accusations about Rothbard's views regarding Russian "non-aggression", the USA relative to Nazi Germany etc. I've been meaning to read the essay's/papers he wrote that contained that material for a while, but never did locate them. I'd like to find them and read them first hand. I'll check Reisman's text, "Capitalism" tonight. I hope he's cited the source for the essays I'm after.

Re Clive Chapman. Playing the man? CC's comment about Rand was in the context of errors such as, but not restricted to, certain disasterous aspects of her life and some of the more unsupportable opinions she offered from time to time. I don't think he meant that her errors or faults outweighed the important contributions she made. As I understand matters, his point was that some of her ideas were erroneous and, like her, they were of a greatness.

LGM
Himalayan meltdown [update]
Many people refer to the "New Scientist" magazine as the "Non-Scientist". Large portions of it are unreadable mush.

"Scientific American" is no better. Over recent times it has degenerated into what is best referred to as the "Un-Scientific Non-American".

If you must look at these rags, read them in the shop and return them to the shelf immediately. Wash your hands! If you need a copy of an article, go over to the library and photocopy it. Better, you can find the same stories on the web (and probably locate more accurate information on the topic of interest while you are at it).

Save your money for something better!

LGM
Agreed LGM. I used to subscribe to NS but stopped after reading too much global warming hysteria, and also after their entire issue devoting to showing us how much better everything would be if the whole world could all just realise that socialism was the only viable economic solution.
TWR

"...their entire issue devoting to showing us how much better everything would be if the whole world could all just realise that socialism was the only viable economic solution."

Holy shitcommander! They consider that "science". Must be the "New Science" they're practising. They make scientology look respectable and logical by comparison.

LGM
TWR

By the way

Your tag-line wouldn't have anything to do with a certain Scot by the name of Walkinshaw by any chance?

LGM
Poneke's work is excellent. I see the idiots at Hot Topic including the main principal there Gareth Renowden, who is an expert in writing children's bed-time story (serious), but doing a similar job as warmist website RealClimate, by trying to debunk everything and anything that skeptics in this country, have say about AGW and their criticism and vile are directed at Poneke, Ian Wishart, members of the NZ ClimateScience, etc,...

Gareth Renowden thinks or likes to equate himself to Prof. Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate.

Every peer review scientific article that is being published by skeptics, they always try to dismiss them at RealClimate, but not publishing a counterargument peer review paper (mostly). This is exactly what Gareth Renowden is doing locally.

Gavin Schmidt, Gareth Renowden and the likes think that they're going God's work, by spreading the warmist gospels in order to save humanity, according to them.
@LGM It would, yes, hence the pic.think that they're going God's work

meant to be:

think that they're doing God's work
TWR

Ah, yes. I see now. Pic wasn't visible on my computer.

You might have liked a car I once had. It was a Series 2 Double-Six fitted up with a Gary Walker turbo kit. The turbo V-12 was a popular set-up with the marine racing fraternity for a while during the 80s & 90s. I don't know what happened to Gary Walker and his Jaguar operation in Sydney after that. I do know that he had three genuine TWR XJS bare chassis from Bathhurst race cars. Interestingly the engine set-back was extreme, but due to the prevailing rules they were considered "standard." The front of the engine was located below and behind the cross-member. Standard indeed!

LGM
Poor William
PC, I think that it is appropriate to change the tile of this post from Poor William into Rich William, which reflects reality.

I bet that the 10 or so people turned up were all journalists where gos mags such as women's weekly (WW) and the likes must have been there too. The lazy fans (yep, their readers) will happily buy the next issue of WW with Rich William on the cover. The readership is quite huge, therefore, even fans didn't make it to the airport to welcome Rich W, and with them buying the gos mags (in huge numbers) with Rich W pic's on the cover, they are actually compensating for their absence from the airport in an indirect manner.
Oww, burn PC :-)
Oh, what larks, Peter.
I even gather William flew on the NZ state airline on a scheduled flight no less, and it wasn't just a plane full of him and his entourage either.

Well done flying the appropriate flag of course. The Queen Mother wasn't exactly a foremost opponent of Nazi Germany before the war, but then again neither were many British academics!
Peter, has the tower at the castle been fixed up? It look spangly new!

then again neither were many British academics!Or business people.
Or King Edward VIII.